John Le - Graphic Designer

Amazing GIF Animations by Jamie Beck

John Le — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:08:54 +0000

No Flash, no HTML5 trickery. Just good old-fashioned GIF animation. New York photographer Jamie Beck has constructed a great collection of GIFs using her own captures. What’s intriguing about these GIFs is how only certain elements of the photo are animated while everything else stays suspended. Take the Busy day in Manhattan… shot as an example. What would seem like a very lively shot with moving objects everywhere has been reduced to an isolated animation of the sitting man paging through his newspaper. I’m also impressed that these GIFs have great colors to them and don’t exhibit excessive dithering, given the limited 256-color GIF palette. [From Me To You]

RED Epic-M Camera Still

John Le — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:37:08 +0000

Check that picture out. Not really impressive at first glance right? Until you realize this is a frame grab from recorded footage of a camera. Photographer Vincent Laforet recorded/captured this shot with the RED Epic-M camera. This $58,000 beast shoots 5,000 lines of resolution at 96 frames per second. A very fitting name for the camera, I say.

Click here to view it at 100% full resolution. [Vincent Laforet]

Killzone 3 Concept Art by Jesse van Dijk

John Le — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:14:44 +0000

Killzone 3 is a gorgeous-looking game. Its predecessor Killzone 2 was also another one. The biggest difference is that the third one is much more varied and colorful. Dutch concept artist Jesse van Dijk may have had some influence in that. He’s worked with various game development studios and is currently signed on with Killzone developer Guerrilla Games. His portfolio is full of top-notch work so go check it out. [Jesse van Dijk]

Moon and Venus Over Switzerland

John Le — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:09:59 +0000

A stunning photograph by David Kaplan showing the small towns of Trübbach, Switzerland and Balzers, Liechtenstein blanketed by clouds with the moon and Venus on display in the morning sky. [NASA]

360° Interactive Panorama from a Helicopter

John Le — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:48:30 +0000

This is as close as you can get to being suspended from a helicopter without being there. northStudio360 shot and created this amazing interactive panorama video of a helicopter’s point of view flying over Nimmo Bay Helicopter Fishing & Wilderness Resort and British Columbia’s coastal mainland.

Click and drag to control the camera view. Also, you may want to mute the sound. Seriously. Video after the break.

[Nimmo Bay]

A Dog’s Devotion

John Le — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:16:32 +0000

A dog’s loyalty knows no boundaries.

The floodings and landslides in Teresopolis, a city near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, continue as I’m writing this, with hundreds lost or dead. A single photo puts a face on the tragedy the country is facing. Two days after his owner died from the flooding, Leao has sat beside her grave refusing to abandon her.

The spirit of Hachiko lives within him.

Branded Packaging Takes on a Minimalist Look

John Le — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:47:18 +0000

When shopping at my local grocery store and glancing at the aisle, one thing comes to my mind: eyesore. Any given aisle is full of branded packaging and each package is filled with flashy graphics, buzzwords, and just about any annoyance that can be thrown on there to get your attention. And when you stack these packages up with each other, you get a wall of noise and clutter with no one thing standing out from the other. Maybe it’s the artist in me but I find minimalism eye-catching. Ironically, the best way to stand out from the crowd is to be simple and minimal. Bold spaces and uncluttered messaging would catch my eye and encourage me to take a longer glance.

Sadly, this doesn’t work in the real world in the new millenium. Humans, by nature, are creatures of habit. After decades of us being exposed to cluttered packaging, we’ve grown accustomed to it and even expect it. Another factor is that big companies have brands to uphold and can’t take big risks such as rebranded packaging. Pepsi tried it recently with its Tropicana brand and they suffered greatly for it. Some of these brands were established decades ago (or even a century ago) when utilitarian messaging was the norm and design was a mere afterthought. Fast-forward to the new millenium and these established brands haven’t changed much. Even new brands showing up today come with cluttered design because it’s the “accepted” way of things. And that’s a shame.

In order for minimalist design to catch on and become accepted not just to our eyes but to our brainwashed minds, it will need time. Decades of exposure to cluttered packaging will take just as long to reverse the effects; only then can we accept minimalist packaging.

Design firm Antrepo is putting us in the right direction by taking some well-known packaged brands and giving them the minimalist treatment. Some work really well like the Red Bull and Nutella examples, but others not so well. I feel that sealed food packages where you can’t see the contents inside (e.g. Pringles and Toffifee) need to have packaging that have the inside contents shown on its cover as a graphic or photo. Nonetheless, a great step towards to minimalist movement. [A2591]

Timescapes: Rapture Video

John Le — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 04:51:40 +0000

Timescapes: Rapture is an amazing landscape video by Tom Lowe, winner of the 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. It starts off with the Blazing Bristlecone scene which won him the award. It depicts the star-riddled Milky Way arching over an ancient bristlecone pine tree in the Sierra Nevada. This jaw-dropping two-minute video is just a segment of Lowe’s modern portrait movie of the Southwest called “Timescapes,” due out sometime in 2011. I’m looking forward to it. He has a few more videos of the movie on his website. Video after the break.

[Timescapes]

Coachelletta Tilt-Shift Time-Lapse Video

John Le — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:03:23 +0000

Sam O’Hare recorded a really great video for the 2010 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The video was shot time-lapsed using a tilt-shift lens. It turns the scenery into miniature sets and the people into small toy figures. It really gets interesting when the sky sets and the lights turn up on stage. Video after the break.

[Vimeo]

Michael Jordan Typography Art and More

John Le — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:44:56 +0000

NBA 2K11 came out yesterday and I’ve been playing it any chance I get outside of work, eat, and sleep. I don’t normally like sports simulation games, selling my Madden NFL 10 just a couple of weeks playing it, but this game is perhaps the best of the current generation. And it’s got Jordan on it! That’s unheard of; he’s only graced on less than a handful of games I can think of. The NBA 2K Jordan edition has re-sparked my childhood interest in the “Greatest of All Time” and I was looking on the Internet for some Jordan wallpapers. I came across this great typography artwork from Ziarekenya Smith, known as PhreshSoldier on deviantART. Sure enough, I was enamored by the typeface artwork I had to look for other examples too. I ended up finding great ones of Steve Jobs, Rihanna, Bruce Lee, Morgan Freeman, Mos Def, and Barack Obama. [deviantART]